Performance Studies Research Focus Group - Interdisciplinary Humanities Center UCSB

16 Jun Performance Studies Research Focus Group

Posted at 12:52h in Research Focus Groups by Admin

Conveners:

Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, Music, Theater & Dance (rhellier-tinoco@music.ucsb.edu)

Nina Bennahum,Theater & Dance (bennahum@theaterdance.ucsb.edu)

Dorota Dutsch, Classics (ddutsch@classics.ucsb.edu)

Shannon Lieberman, History of Art & Architecture (shannon02@umail.ucsb.edu)

Research interests of the group:

This Focus Group creates an interdisciplinary space where faculty and graduate students from various fields of study can share and expand an emphasis on issues related to “doing,” performance, music, dance, theater, art, film, media, and everyday life. As an area of research, Performance Studies is primarily defined by its flexibility; it is even said that its position as a “contested” category is precisely its major advantage. Gender, ethnicity, and identity are some of the basic concepts that Performance Studies explores within a global and intercultural context. Anthropology has been, in many ways, one of the epistemic models followed by the so-called founders of Performance Studies: Erving Goffman (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959); Victor Turner (From Ritual to Theatre, 1982); and Richard Schechner (Between Theater and Anthropology, 1985). Nonetheless, other approaches have also been adopted, including semiotics, feminism, proxemics, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, as the work of Diana Taylor, Una Chauduri, or Joseph Roach testifies. As a result, Performance Studies has become primarily a site for intersections and experiments, an inclusive frame of mind and practice that uncovers unexpected angles and resources. Blurring the boundaries between theory and praxis, Performance Studies enables a wide array of lines of inquiry: for example, how might theatricality be a better term than theatre or drama for understandings of performance? In which ways might sports be regarded as different from, or similar to, melodrama or computer games? How, and with what consequences, is a courthouse a stage? How is the naturalization of mediated acts created by technology affecting our definitions of ritual, mimesis, illusion, or political activism? The purpose of our Focus Group is to provide a forum in which these kinds of questions can be addressed and tested among our faculty, students, and artists.

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UPCOMING EVENTS:

ONGOING PROGRAM OF MEETINGS

What: A space and place for:- exploring new ideas; sharing ongoing research; putting an idea out there; tackling thorny notions and creative practice; engaging with Faculty and grad students from other disciplines.
Who: grad students and Faculty from many disciplines, including music, theater, dance, art, media, anthropology, history, politics, creative studies, film, classics, cultural studies, sociology, geography….and many others.
Why should I be part of this?: because you’ll be with a small group of buzzing and supportive people who want to move things forward.
We meet informally for a discussion of ideas twice a quarter. We also schedule talks and events with invited speakers. We’re planning a mini-conference for grad students in any discipline. You can come to one event or all events.
If you’d like to be sent details of future events, please send an email to Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, rhellier-tinoco@music.ucsb.edu.

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(Please see further below for full descriptions of each event)

SPRING 2012

TALK

Friday 6 April, 1.30 – 3.30

McCune Conference Center

Richard Bauman

Indiana University, Bloomington

“There’s a good deal to everything”:

country communicability on early commercial sound recordings in the U.S.

Co-sponsored by IHC-sponsored Research Focus Group and Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Emphasis in Language, Interaction, and Social Organization, and CISM, the Center for the Interdisciplinary Studies of Music.

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DISCUSSION/PRESENTATION

Monday, 9 April 2012, 7 PM, TD 1703 (Theater/Dance)

Ruth Hellier-Tinoco and Carol Press (UCSB Music, Theater & Dance), with contributions from UCSB students.

Re-Membering: Creating memories/histories

Creative processes and creativity in performance-making and educational contexts provide the focus for this session, grounded in a principle of the profound significance of creativity as an active and ongoing practice in shaping understanding of self and others, enriching and filling life with meaning and dynamic relations. We discuss creative involvement, on many levels of subjective experience, as a connection to our actions and to our values, and explore ways in which memories and histories are used to create performances (and correspondingly how performances create memories, histories and herstories).

Case material draws on undergraduate experiences in interdisciplinary performance-making at UCSB in Ruth Hellier-Tinoco’s course “Performance/Memory/History,” and Carol Press’ work choreographing new dance pieces.

Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, PhD, is a scholar, creator and performer. Her recent publication, Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism and Performance (OUP) engages with performance studies, ethnomusicology, dance studies, and theatre studies.

Carol M. Press, PhD, is a dance scholar and choreographer, who teachers dance history. She is the author of numerous articles and a monograph, The Dancing Self: Creativity, Modern Dance, Self Psychology and Transformative Education.

Sponsored by the Performance Studies Research Focus Group of the IHC. In association with Primavera: UCSB’s Festival of Contemporary Arts and Digital Media, College of Creative Studies.

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PERFORMANCE

Tuesday 10 April 2012, 7PM, TD 1703 (Theater/Dance)

Re-Membering: Performing memories/histories

Ruth Hellier-Tinoco (UCSB Music, Theater/Dance) and UCSB students

Extracts of interdisciplinary performances (work-in-progress), engaging music, theater, film, movement, performance art, and multimedia created and performed by undergraduate students of music and theater, facilitated by Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, through her course “Performance/ Memory/ History.” Ranging from 5 to 15 minutes in duration, each piece was created over a period of six weeks, particularly working with ideas of fragmentation, juxtaposition, mnemonics, ritual, witness, and iconicity, and engaging with a single person or a unique event as the core of the creative processes.

Sponsored by the Performance Studies Research Focus Group of the IHC. In association with Primavera: UCSB’s Festival of Contemporary Arts and Digital Media, College of Creative Studies.

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Talk

Thursday 19 April, 3.45 PM TD 251

Marianne Sharp, PhD

Acting Operatically: Voice, Body and the Actress in Beckett’s Happy Days

This paper offers a detailed analysis of the voice and body work of renowned British/Irish stage actress, Fiona Shaw (better known internationally as Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter films) in the 2007-8 Royal National Theatre London’s production of Beckett’s Happy Days. This saw the UK’s “terrible-two,” Shaw and director Deborah Warner, reunited on a Beckett production thirteen years after their collaboration on Footfalls was banned by the Beckett Foundation after the pair refused to adhere to Beckett’s strict stage directions.

Focusing on what I term her “operatic” vocal score, I explore Shaw’s performance as Winnie. In Beckett’s diminishing sentence structures, to whom does the actress speak as her body sinks deeper into the earth, when “words fail” and she has only the possibility to “gaze before me with compressed lips”? Utilizing Barthes’ work in “The Grain of the Voice” (1977) and Steven Connor’s work on “the Sob” (2008), I argue that Shaw’s spoken vocal score can be characterized as an extended sob, with particular implications for the spectator’s experience of the work.

Marianne Sharp is a professor of theater and drama in the Department of Performing Arts, University of Winchester, UK. She is currently researching the work of LA performing artist Rachel Rosenthal.

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TALK

Monday April 30, 2012, 2:00-4:00pm

McCune Conference Center

“Radio / Puppets, or Old New Media and the Afterlife of the Mexican Avant-Garde”

Sarah Townsend

Over the course of several years beginning in 1933, a character called Troka el poderoso (Troka the Powerful) regaled young listeners of XFX, the official radio station of Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Education, with fables in which modern machines conquer space and time while flaunting their strength and speed in the face of the older technologies they claim to supersede. Troka’s eyes were streetlights; his nerves were telegraph wires; his muscles were cranes; his arms were radio towers. And his Voice? It was the medium of radio itself. Troka was the ghost in the machine, the imaginary agent of technology that would lead Mexico out of underdevelopment and place the country on par with its imperial neighbor to the north. Yet his power hinged on some curious contradictions. For all his promises to put paid to the past, Troka was a belated offshoot of the estridentista avant-garde. And while he claimed to be the medium of radio, archival evidence indicates that he was originally envisioned (and perhaps embodied) as a marionette.

This presentation reconstructs the disjointed genesis of Troka the Powerful in order to show how the “revolutionary” medium of radio took shape vis-a-vis the “old” art of puppetry. In doing so, it engages a self-reflexive turn in the field of new media studies that seeks to reconceptualize the newness of digital media and reimagine media as historical subjects. At the same time it offers a new angle on current debates about the impact of digital media on theater and other modes of “live” performance. The talk asks what a radio puppet born in the afterlife of the avant-garde in a “backward” country such as postrevolutionary Mexico can tell us about the power and precarity of technological agency—particularly in the context of our recent economic recession, when it is increasingly apparent that new media are both enabled and bound by material strings.

Sarah J. Townsend, PhD, is an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.

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Presentation

Wednesday 9 May 3.15 PM

McCune Conference Center

Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism and Performance

Ruth Hellier-Tinoco (UCSB, Music)

Book presentation, with speakers, and live music and dance.

Speakers:

María Herrera-Sobek (Associate Vice Chancellor and Chicana/o Studies)

Sarah Cline (History)

Suk-Young Kim (Theater: Performance Studies)

Ninotchka Bennahum (Dance: Performance Studies)

Dave Novak (Music)

With:

Raíces de mi Tierra dancers (UCSB’s student folklórico ensemble)

Musicians: Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, Juan Zaragoza, Ann Hefferman, Daisy León

Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism and Performance

Oxford University Press, 2011.

Exploring multiple contexts in Mexico, the USA, and Europe, Embodying Mexico expands and enriches our understanding of complex processes of creating national icons, performance repertoires, and tourist attractions. Hellier-Tinoco examines two performative icons of Mexicanness–the Dance of the Old Men and Night of the Dead of Lake Pátzcuaro–in numerous manifestations, including film, theater, tourist guides, advertisements, and souvenirs. Covering a ninety-year period from the postrevolutionary era to the present day, Hellier-Tinoco’s analysis is thoroughly grounded in Mexican politics and history, and simultaneously incorporates choreographic, musicological, and dramaturgical analysis.

Gazing on Fragments: An exhibition of research artifacts and books used in the research process will run from April to June in the Davidson Library, UCSB.

Ruth Hellier-Tinoco is an assistant professor in the Department of Music, whose work engages the fields of performance studies, ethnomusicology, dance and theater studies, Latin American history, feminist studies, and community arts.

Sponsored by the Performance Studies Research Focus Group of the IHC.

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Gender, Creative Dissidence, and the Discourses of African Diaspora

A conference in honor of Ama Ata Aidoo’s 70th birthday,

Thursday, May 24, to Saturday, May 26, 2012

McCune conference room, HSSB 6020

Conference Organizers: Christina McMahon (Theater and Dance), Stephan Miescher (History), and Jude Akudinobi (Black Studies)

African Studies Research Focus Group of the IHC

Co-sponsored by the Performance Studies Research Focus GrouP

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Student Colloquium: The Knowing Body

FRIDAY June 1, 2012

McCune Conference Center

Schedule to be announced.

Call for Papers/Presentations: Deadline: March 30

Corporeality has long been a driving issue in performance studies, as scholars and performers have sought to understand the many roles the body has performed throughout history and across cultures. Increasingly, the term “corporealities” has come to encompass the multiple encodings inscribed upon and embodied within the flesh. More than a way of being, theorists from diverse fields have proposed that “corporeality” refers not just to the materiality of bodies, but to embodiment as a way of knowing. Can the body be considered an archive, a mobile, historical space of memory and consciousness, capable of healing and art making? What if the ‘knowing body’ was inclusive of the notion of the dancing body? What, then, do bodies know, and how do they come to know? What impact does reading bodies as “knowing” have on different fields of inquiry, such as education, medicine, and the law? What impact does it have on physical endeavors such as dance and sports? What implications might it have for social justice? Does the concept of the knowing body exist only as a theoretical abstraction, or can it be quantified in practice? How might concepts of the knowing body differ by cultural group? How does the notion of the knowing body change existing conceptions of the intellect and the self? The Performance Studies Research Focus Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites proposals from graduate and advanced undergraduate students for 20-minute paper sessions, performances (or excerpts), and organized roundtable discussions concerning the issue of the knowing body. The questions above are intended as prompts only, and submissions exploring other issues related to performance studies will also be considered. Students from all disciplines are welcome, as are proposals for experimental work and work in progress for which students would like feedback.

Please send an abstract of 250-300 words along with a cover sheet listing your name, institutional affiliation and department, contact details, primary area of interest or research, the title and format of your proposed presentation, and a description of any technical or audio/visual requirements to Shannon M. Lieberman (shannon02@umail.ucsb.edu) by March 30, 2012. Notifications of acceptance will be issued by April 18, 2012. There is no fee to participate in or attend the colloquium.

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################################################################################################################PAST MEETINGS AND EVENTS

CAST:

LA MALINCHE — Nina Bennahum

HERNAN CORTES — Irwin Appel

LA LLORONA — Ruth Hellier-Tinoco

CIUACOATL — Rachel Wolfe

BISHOP LIZARRAGA — Brian Granger

SANCHEZ – Zachary Price

Carlos Morton is professor of theater and a playwright.

Ruth Hellier-Tinoco is assistant professor of music, theater and dance and a former actress and performer.

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PERFORMANCE STUDIES:

What is it for? Part 2

Discussion facilitated by Ruth Hellier-Tinoco

Open Discussion: all invited to participate or to come and listen

Friday 24 February, 5-6.30 PM

IHC Research Seminar Room

(6056 HSSB – near the McCune Conference Room)

In this informal gathering we continue to debate issues concerning the notion of “performance studies” and its efficacy in enabling provocations, understandings, and actions. Picking up themes and threads from our meeting on 29 November — text into/as performance; public history/performing history; avant garde and performance art; social/ ceremonial/ political processes; doing not being– and inviting other topics, we’ll discuss how we variously use theories/methods/frameworks drawn from Performance Studies, guided by the question “How is Performance Studies efficacious in my research?”

Provocation:

“There are people who already know, or think they know, what performance studies is. This book is not for them. This book is for the people who like not knowing, who find the uncertainty of unmapped terrain exhilarating. This is also true of the field itself. What makes performance studies unique is that it shares the characteristics of its object: performance. Just as performance is contingent, contested, hard to pin down, so too is its study. For the most part, those of use who consider ourselves ‘performance studies people’ like it that way” (Henry Bial in The Performance Studies Reader, 1: 2007).

Do we “like it that way”? Or is Performance Studies such a catchall that embraces so many disciplines and so many aspects of life that it is no longer useful? In this session our aim is to debate some of the key and pressing issues of Performance Studies as related to our own areas of research. Performance Studies has a varied and interdisciplinary trajectory of many decades, and in the twenty-first century Performance Studies as a field and discipline continues to been taken up by many fields for differing agendas. We invite you bring to the session a brief explanation (3 mins) of how you use theories/methods/frameworks drawn from Performance Studies in your own research, guided by the question “How is Performance Studies efficacious in my research?”

This should allow us to get a sense of the connections and diversity of those interested in Performance Studies at UCSB at the current moment. (If you would prefer to listen, rather than actively contribute, this is fine).

If you would like to distribute any texts to potential attendees prior to the session, please contact Ruth by email. We will have facilities for projection in the seminar room, so please also bring any materials that you think might be useful. And finally, as per discussion at our first meeting, please document the session in any appropriate way (contact Ruth about this).

*Please contact Ruth by email with suggestions, comments, proposals and ideas for the PS RFG. We’re planning not just this year, but future years.

Rhellier-tinoco@music.ucsb.edu

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Fall 2011

Tuesday Nov 29, 5-6pm

IHC Research Seminar Room

(6056 HSSB – near the McCune Conference Room)

PERFORMANCE STUDIES:Part 1

Is it still useful OR Is it time to ditch it?

Facilitated by Ruth Hellier-Tinoco

Open Discussion: all invited to participate or to come and listen

The Performance Studies Reader, Introduction, Henry Bial, p. 1. Routledge 2007.

As part of the session, Ruth Hellier-Tinoco will undertake a brief summary of the histories of Performance Studies.

As a framework for discussion, participants may like to review standard texts such as:

Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction. Routledge 2003.

Henry Bial, ed. The Performance Studies Reader. Routledge 2007.

Erin Striff, ed. Performance Studies. Palgrave Macmillan 2003.

A cursory glance at the website of Performance Studies International (PSi) may also be useful: http://psi-web.org/

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Wednesday November 2, 2:00-3:30pm

“Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption of the 1970s”

Sam Binkley (Sociology, Emerson College)

Theater and Dance Building, 2517

Sponsored by the Department of Theater and Dance and the Performance Studies Research Focus Group.

From “getting loose” to “letting it all hang out,” the 1970s were filled with exhortations to free oneself from artificial restraints and to discover oneself in a more authentic and creative life. In the wake of the counterculture of the 1960s, anything that could be made to yield to a more impulsive vitality was reinvented in a looser way. Binkley investigates the dissemination of these self-loosening narratives and their widespread appeal to America’s middle class, describing the rise of a genre of lifestyle publishing that emerged from a network of small offbeat presses, mostly located on the West Coast. Drawing on the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, and others, Binkley explains how self-loosening narratives helped the middle class confront the modernity of the 1970s.

Sam Binkley is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emerson College. His research focuses on the formation of subjectivity in the context of contemporary social life. His book Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Duke 2007) examines the role of lifestyle print culture in the shaping of personal identity. He is currently working on a new book project on happiness, life coaching and positive psychology, read through the lens of neo-liberal governmentality.

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Notes: Meet and greet, Wednesday 26 October, 5pm – 6pm. TD 2517

Co-conveners: Ninotchka Bennahum, Dorota Dutsch, Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, and Shannon Liebermann.

In attendance:

7 Faculty, from 3 departments (theater & dance, music, classics)

11 Grad students from 8 departments (comp lit, English, classics, theater, MAT (media arts & technology), chicana & chicano studies, Spanish and Portuguese, History/Public History).

1. Sharing of interests and ideas

Wide range, but with cohering threads and themes, including:

uses of technology;

history and performance;

gender/feminist/queer/Latina/o identities and spaces;

public history and display of history/urban history;

intellectual history of the discipline of performance studies;

borders

adaptions/language (Medea/La Malinche),

texts and technology

2. Discussion of proposed programme and events for the year.

Proposed theme for this year: bodies/ CORPOREALITIES/embodiment.

Proposed events (dates, times, and venue TBA):

Twice-termly discussions-propose a reading/bring a provocation

ACTION: ALL ARE ENCOURAGED TO SUBMIT IDEAS. PLEASE DO SHARE YOUR RESEARCH OR ONGOING IDEAS. OPEN FORUM – WE JUST NEED ABOUT 4 WEEKS TO SELECT A SUITABLE TIME-SLOT AND BOOK A ROOM.

Winter quarter: sessions prompted by provocations by Ninotchka Bennahum

ACTION: FUTURE EVENTS TO BE DECIDED – PROPOSALS FOR READINGS/DISCUSSION POINTS TO BE FORWARDED TO RUTH H-T.

Ruth Hellier-Tinoco – book launch – and library exhibit.

Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism and Performance (OUP)

ACTION: DATE TO BE SET.

Prisoners and prisons, theater & drama (discipline and punish or facilitate and enable)

Linking with the year-long IHC Public Goods theme.

Organizer: Dorota Dutsch

Participants: Michael Morgan (Theater), Francis Dunn (Classics), Ruth Hellier-Tinoco (Music, Theater/Dance), and Nancy Rabinowitz (reception of Greek tragedy – the Medea project).

ACTION: DATE TO BE SET.

Screening of a film, with discussion: bodies and the reception framework (liveness/ presence). Organized by Shannon Lierbermann.

ACTION: FILM TO BE DECIDED AND DATE TO BE SET.

Graduate Student colloquium. Date and theme to be decided. Please propose ideas to the conveners (email Ruth). Grad students – this is an opportunity for you to get your research (at whatever stage) out there.

ACTION: AGREEMENT THAT GRADUATE STUDENT COLLOQUIUM WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA. POSSIBLY RUN IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE DEPT OF ENGLISH/ RA HEMISPHERIC SOUTH/S RESEARCH INITIATIVE GRAD CONFERENCE (SEE BELOW). DATE AND THEME TO BE DECIDED. PLEASE PROPOSE IDEAS TO THE CONVENERS (EMAIL RUTH). CONTINUE DISCUSSION WITH INTERESTED PEOPLE AND MAKE FIRM PROPOSALS TO TAKE THIS FORWARD.

Links with Department of English- Graduate conference on performance.

Kristie Soares, grad student, Comparative Literature Program. RA Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative. May 11-12, 2012

Discussion: whether the PS RFG Grad student colloquium might be held to interface with this. Also discussion about what activities can/should usefully be part of a performance conference.

*ACTION: KRISTIE TO DISCUSS WITH PROF. BATISTE, RE: POSSIBILITIES OF SHARING EVENT.

*ACTION: ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ABOUT PERFORMANCE CONFERENCES – WHAT SORTS OF EVENTS/ACTIVITIES/PRESENTATIONS HAVE PARTICIPANTS EXPERIENCED?; WHAT IS BENEFICIAL AND EFFICACIOUS? WHAT ARE THE PEDAGOGICAL AND PERFORMATIVE FRAMEWORKS?

TAKE THIS AS THEME FOR DISCUSSION AT NEXT MEETING (TUE NOV 29, 5-6PM)?

Documentation

Proposal to document events – agreement that any form of documentation would be extremely welcome and that participants should simply do this, with usual ethical permissions processes in place. Contact convenors (email Ruth) with ideas and they will organize the appropriate permissions.

Website and ongoing communcation

Website – a space to post ideas and events, and proposal to set up a blog for ongoing discussion.

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Archived Events

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Performance Studies RFG